World

A Scientific Breakthrough Might Make You Live For 12 Decades

They say age is just a number, right? While teenagers become the new 20-somethings in fashion and plastic surgeons make Real Housewives look straight out of Stepford, it’s clear that the natural wrinkled look is as desirable as fruitcake during the holidays. Beauty empires have formed out of the desire to look ageless, yet the fountain of youth has eluded everyone who isn’t named Nicholas Flamel—until now.

Apparently, the secret to living comfortably into your triple digits has come in the form of a pill used to treat diabetes. According to NZ Herald News, metformin is the miracle drug that could ensure that you live into your 120s so you don’t miss a moment of society’s ongoing destruction of the Earth. The pill has already been proven to extend the lives of animals. The tiny roundworm C. elegans aged slower and stayed healthier longer after ingesting metformin. The key to its effectiveness is an increase in the number of oxygen molecules released into a cell, which appears to boost robustness and longevity. It’s not even expensive—the drug only costs 10 cents a day. What’s good, Pharma Bro?

Faaaaabulous.

Basically, we’re biologically able to live forever. Our cells are rad little guys stamped with a DNA blueprint that could keep a body functioning correctly until we all die out in an ice age or the rapture. The problem is that our cells have to divide to live and over our lifetime billions of cell divisions occur and the more our cells divide, the more problems we have. In non-scientific terms, we’ve got 99 problems, and aging is related to at least 80 of them.

The Food and Drug Administration in the U.S. just gave the green light for a clinical trial. They want to see if the same effects can be replicated in humans. The study will be filed under the name Targeting Aging with Metformin, or TAME, which Miley definitely won’t agree with. Anti-aging isn’t just good news for the beauty world, either. According to Professor Gordon Lithgow of the Buck Institute for Research on Ageing in California, “If you target an aging process and you slow down aging then you slow down all the diseases and pathology of aging as well.”

If human tests are successful and don’t create a Benjamin Button monstrosity, you can look forward to more than just scarcity of resources and overpopulation. We’ll all be able to witness Yeezy Season 45’s revolutionary light teal color palette, a thousand more covers of ‘Forever Young,’ Madonna’s 307th birthday, and a cultural resurgence of 90s fashion at least seventeen more times. Let’s dance in style and let’s dance for a while, because the future is looking a whole lot longer.